Anyone who has existed within academia knows that to portray it as a world of innocents is a sick joke. Historians, like other academics, often go in hard. Their preference is to do their dirty work in secret -- and in this regard, unlike his shallow and doctrinaire appraisals of Australia's past, the Marxist professor was a leader in the field

The much-touted 'education revolution', rather than fostering innovation and creativity, has produced bureaucratic universities antithetical to spirit of genuine discovery. As one academic observed, there is an infestation of 'unscrupulous people who believe ... they can act any way they want'

What happens when historians forget that history is about inquiry and instead see themselves as founts of wisdom which is not open to challenge? When two of my colleagues at Wollongong University took exception to my argument, I learnt all about their methods

I’ve worked my way through Robert Tilley’s excellent Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth. We need to understand and appreciate Benedict who is one of the leading intellectuals of our age.

I should like to begin with a quote: As there […]

Gregory Melleuish reads “Police, Civilisation and Culture” from his new book of essays The Power of Ideas.

I HAVE READ and re-read Kevin Rudd’s speech launching the […]

History warriors wedded to political schemes cannot be good historians because they cannot allow themselves to be open to the ambiguous and elusive qualities of human beings.  For political purposes all they want to see are the massacres and the brutality.

The idea that governments should spend freely for their constituents, and institute bad policies such as Protection, made many Australians in the twentieth century consider government to be essentially a giant honey pot for their benefit. This attitude is best summed up by Norman Lindsay’s book The Magic Pudding. The more that one eats the more that there is to eat.